Learning Letter

Dear Sean,

I have had a wonderful time this quarter growing as a student and as a future teacher.  Through this class I have become aware of my strengths and weaknesses as a teacher.  Now that I am aware of some of those strengths and weaknesses I can focus on growing even more to become a better teacher.

I enjoyed the book talks.  I loved learning about the different books that were presented in class and realized I had not had the chance to read most of the books that were presented.  During my own presentation, I was unsure on how to connect and expand on the points that needed to be covered.  The guidance given allowed for me to grow in my decision making skills for books to use in the classroom.

The lesson plans were a great experience.  All of the professors I have had say something different about writing TPA lesson plans.  The advice you gave was more helpful and direct than I have had.  This has allowed for me to grow in my lesson plan writing skills.

The Unit Plans were the most difficult for me.  I had no idea on how to connect lessons together in a sequence.  I gave it a go.  I also, found that I like to read to my students and have discussions with them.  I learned that I feel discussion is an important part of reading any text to help create a better understanding.  But I also learned that I do not like doing similar activities for too many days in a row.

I was glad we got to discuss and learn about how standardized testing was first implemented.  I had never done any research into it before this class.  I also was able to take many different concepts about reading from the different books we discussed in class.  I will be using some of those strategies in my own classroom.

Thank you for a wonderful quarter,

Dez

Night TPA Lesson Plan

edTPA Lesson Plan #1 Course 493

1. Teacher Candidate	Dezarae West	Date Taught	11/20/17
Cooperating Teacher	Stephanie Yanuszeski	School/District	Westwood Middle School
2. Subject	ELA	Field Supervisor	Clive Gary
3. Lesson Title/Focus	Point of View	5. Length of Lesson	20 minutes
4. Grade Level	10th grade

6. Academic & Content Standards (GLEs/EARLs/Common Core)	CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.7 Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person’s life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account. CCSS.ELA.LITERACY.RL.9-10.6 Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature for outside the United Stated, drawing on a wide reading of world literature.
7. Learning Objective(s)	Given Night by Elie Wiesel and I Survived the Holocaust Twin Experiments YouTube video, students will be able to analyze a particular point of view through various accounts of a subject by journaling from the point of view on forgiveness assigned by the teacher.
8. Academic Language	Vocabulary: Point of view, analyze, forgiveness Function: Students will analyze the different points of view. Syntax: Students will be analyzing a particular point of view and show their understanding by journaling from the point of view on forgiveness assigned by the teacher. Discourse: Students will participate in a whole class discussion with the teacher about point of view and forgiveness to collaborate an understanding.

9. Assessment

Informal Formative Assessment: Students will be journaling on an assigned point of view on forgiveness of the Holocaust. This will assess the students understanding of analyzing multiple points of view through different mediums.

10. Lesson Connections

Prior Knowledge: This lesson further enhances students’ understanding of point of view because it pulls upon students’ knowledge on point of view from reading To Kill a Mocking Bird. Students have just finished reading about the Holocaust in Night by Elie Wiesel and they will analyze his point of view to write about forgiveness. Future Lesson Connections: Students will continue their knowledge of analyzing points of view through reading a variety of novels and books.  To build upon the skills the students will also write a short essay about why a book was written from a specific point of view. Research: I am teaching this lesson because, “One of life’s biggest challenges is accepting that there are numerous interpretations and that there is rarely one right way to view the world. Literature can introduce characters who have learned to accept that different viewpoints exist, demonstrating how they persevere when faced with difficulties” (486-494). By analyzing point of view through different mediums, students will develop a better understanding of texts and the world around them. This understanding will lead to a deeper comprehension of points of view.

11. Instructional Strategies/Learning Tasks to Support Learning
Learning Tasks and Strategies Sequenced Instruction
Teacher’s Role 1.      Teacher will introduce the lesson step by step (1 minute) 2.      The teacher will read the learning objective. (1 minutes) 3.      Have a student voice why the learning goal is important (1 minute) 4.      Teacher will ask students what point of view and forgiveness are. (1 minutes) 5.      The teacher will introduce the video being shown. (1 minute) 6.      Teacher will play the video starting at 0:40-3:41, 8:20-9:41, 10:00-13:11, 13:34-14:25 (8 minutes) 7.      Teacher will tell the students the A and B points of view, then assign students their point of view (2 minutes) 8.      Teacher will ask the students to begin journaling on their points of view (5 minutes) 9.      Teacher will have the students continue their point of view journal in class the next day.	Students’ Role 1.      Students will actively listen to the explanation of the lesson. (1 minute) 2.      The students will actively listen to the teacher read the learning objective. The learning goal will function as a target by which the student’s learning should be reached by the end of the period. (1 minute) 3.      A student will voice why the learning goal is important. (1 minute) 4.      One or two students will answer what point of view and forgiveness are. (1 minute) 5.      Students will listen to the teacher’s introduction of the video. (1 minute) 6.      Students will watch the video thinking about point of view and forgiveness. (8 minutes) 7.      Students will call off if they are an A or B writer. (2 minutes) 8.      Students will begin journaling on their given point of view about forgiveness and the Holocaust. (5 minutes) 9.      Students will put their papers in their binder to work on in class the next day.
Student Voice to Gather (journal) Students will be journaling on the given point of view on why they could or could not forgive those who ran the concentration camps during the Holocaust.

12. Differentiated Instruction

Plan Student Interest: This lesson interests students because it has individual work. Students will also be able to connect their views on forgiveness to their journal entry on the given point of view. Students will get to watch a short video about forgiveness and the Holocaust, this will bring in the use of technology with an informational text. Learning Styles: This lesson appeals to kinesthetic learners because there is “hands-on” work. Visual learners will get to see a visual representation of forgiveness and point of view. Auditory learners will get to hear the point of view from a Holocaust survivor. This will help both my high and low students because I am showing a video of a Holocaust survivor and her point of view, I am reviewing what point of view is, students get to see examples of different points of view, and the assignment lays out what is required of students for their journal entry on point of view. Student Needs: Visually impaired student will be able to move closer to the board in order to see better.  My lower reading level students will have multiple opportunities to hear and see examples.  Students will be able to ask me clarification questions as needed.  Also, by having the different methods of learning, students will be able to access to a variety of resources during the class. Students A and B have 504’s and will have clear instructions and extended time when necessary. Students C and D will leave the room to work on the task with their Para.

13. Resources and Materials

Materials Student Materials: Writing utensils, paper, copy of Night Teacher Materials: dry erase marker, white board, white board eraser, copy of learning goals, computer, projector, video title or URL, copy of Night Resources B. (2017, September 15). I survived the holocaust twin experiments. Retrieved November 20, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdgPAetNY5U Giorgis, C., & Johnson, N.J. (2002). Multiple perspectives. The Reading Teacher, 55(5), 486-494. Wiesel, E. (2006). Night. Hill and Wang, NY.

14. Management and Safety Issues

Plan Management issues will come when students are watching the video. The students may start to lose focus halfway through the video. Students may also get off task when they are writing their journals. To keep students on task I will roam the room, observe, and occasionally participate in discussions of how students are doing to help keep students on task. Some students may also have family that were alive during WWII and/or be survivors of the Holocaust.  To help those students I will be open to allowing those students to change their point of view from A to B or B to A.  I also will mention that the topic being covered today only focuses on these two points of view but there are multiple points of view surrounding the Holocaust and forgiveness. The students will be allowed to go to the counselor if they feel they need to.

15. Parent & Community Connections

Plan Parents/Guardians: Students will be given a challenge to discuss the topic of point of view or the concept of forgiveness, with a prompt to take home, with their parent or guardian.  The parent or guardian will need to initial the prompt to show the student had this discussion with them. Community: Students will be challenged to find an event that has happened in their community that may have created tensions among different people and write about the points of views they find on that subject.

Poe- Fall of the House of Usher

Many people know Edgar Allan Poe to be a dark author.  Many of his texts have a melancholy feel to them.  Poe, himself, may have even suffered from depression.  But aside all of the things that make Poe Poe, he was an amazing writer.

Fall of the House of Usher is a great short story.  It is even a little creepy.  With all the different aspects in the story, it may be hard to figure out what is going on.  The first time I read the story I thought the family was incestuous.  The next time I read it, I realized disease was among the two siblings.  I had to do research to figure out what diseases might be mentioned in the story.  The last time I read the story, I questioned the narrator's sanity.

To know that the sister was possibly buried alive and do nothing about it, why?  While reading, I thought Roderick was simply crazy.  I have read this story twice before reading it for today in other classes.  I never understood the layers of complexity Poe uses.  One really has to take their time to read through the text carefully and peel back the layers to see the narrator is the one who has lost his mind.

At the very end of the story, the narrator is running away from the House of Usher because he believes he has just seen Madeline and Roderick die.  He runs away!  The two siblings die upon impact of Madeline attacking Roderick.  This in itself hints at disease but, the narrator acts so strangely that one is left with the question of what really happened.

Readicide

The decline in student interest for reading has been a controversial topic for a while among educators.  As standardized testing becomes more popular, Kelley Gallagher mentions that reading interests decline.  I thought this was an interesting statement.  There is still resistance to use standardized testing and there’s debate around that as well.  So when Gallagher states that some teachers may not focusing on interest reading but instead teaching reading to the test, students lose interest in reading.

I could see this being an issue.  As a future teacher, I try to focus on finding texts that will interest my students before I introduce the material to the class.  Then, I will give the students background knowledge and explain the importance of the text and how it relates to them.

I have some students that are at a lower reading level that love to read.  I was one of those once I figured out why I was having a hard time reading myself as a student in elementary and middle school.

I also remember not learning how to “critically” read a text until almost 8th grade.  Many times the teacher would read and we would follow along and journal about what we read afterwards.  I didn’t learn to ask “why?” or “what did I just read?” until 7th and 8th grade.  I had already created reading habits that didn’t work well for critically analyzing a text.  I was a “fake reader.”  As Gallagher mentions, many students are falling into this.  I am happy that there are methods given on how to help students avoid losing interest in reading.

I Read it, but I Don't Get it

I thought this was a very interesting read.  I have read a few works by Kelly Gallagher on how to teach students about writing.  I am so excited to see books like this written by Tovani.

As a student, I remember struggling to learn how to be an "active/engaged" reader.  I still will catch myself blindly reading through a text and realize that I don't remember anything that I just read.  It has happened a lot for me over the years.  This book, however, has some amazing strategies for helping teach our students how to overcome this type of reading.

First of all, I love being able to share stories with my students to show them that I am trying to help them achieve.  So, by telling them that I have read with the same struggles would help them connect with what I am trying to teach.  It would help bring the learning to them in such a way they have a connection and motivation to learn.

Social Justice

Social justice is an important topic among educators.  It is the act of creating positive change.  We can all do this, whether it's in our classrooms or in daily activities.  As educators, we need to think of how we can implement this in our classroom and teach this concept to our students.

First of all, teachers should not look at implenting social justice as an add on to their lessons.  Our lessons show be focused around social justice.  This could be as simple as connecting the lesson to the everyday lives of our students.  We should be thinking about this connection for our lessons to begin with.  When I think back on when I was a student, I didn't stay engaged with an assignment or lesson unless I knew how it related to my life.  Even now, I hear students walking down the halls asking each other when they're ever going to use certain parts of lessons.

Secondly, if students know they can make a positive change, they will be more likely to act.  Back in high school we had to do community service projects to graduate.  Many classmates complained about how boring or time consuming it was.  I always enjoyed doing the community service, but I saw the positive effects it had on those I helped.  But, our teachers never mentioned why it was important to us to participate in community service.  Many families got the help they needed to get back up on their feet and some of the people in nursing homes had a little bit of joy brought back into their lives.

Lastly, social justice is important to our classrooms for many reasons.  It helps bring students together.  Students learn they have a voice and can change what is going on in the world around them, they can stop negative things happening in the school.  Students also get to connect better with what they are learning.  The better they connect to the lessons, the more they will comprehend and they will lead themselves to a higher level of thinking.

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/creating-classrooms-for-social-justice-tabitha-dellangelo

Philosophy of Education

When thinking about teaching and methods of how to teach, we are given so much information of the "best ways" to teach and the "worst ways."  Research shows us the positive outcomes to certain methods of teaching.  Why is it not every teacher teaches to their students in the "best ways?"

As teachers, we want to give our students the best chance for success.  This usually means giving them information.  However, we do this at such a rapid pace, we may sometimes forget to help make connects from our lessons to the world our students are currently living in.  When this happens, we've all seen it, the students start to not care about what they are learning.

As students lose or never gain an interest in learning, we have to ask ourselves, "What could I do better?"  Teachers have the ability to make learning a fun and creative thing for students.  We should be finding new ways to teach the same materials that were taught to us.  Think about what would help get our students engaged in the learning rather than "regurgitate" the information we give to them daily.  As teachers, we should not be using what is referred to as the "banking" method of teaching.

Student success first begins with effective ways of teaching.  I know that as a student, I have always enjoyed learning.  I never saw any down-side to it.  However, as I got older, I got bored doing the same routine over and over again.  Show up, sit down, take notes, lunch, take notes, go home, and repeat.  In middle school, I started to lose interest in school.  I began wondering why we were learning what we were learning and if it was even useful to us.  As students, we were told that it would help us in "the real world."  But, it never clicked until junior year of high school when we started applying for colleges.

Now, I thought it was interesting to read that the "banking" system of education is referred to as oppressing students and their creativity.  I had never heard of that before.  I plan to do more reading on this topic to further my knowledge of the subject.

Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning

This was a very interesting article to read.  Many different teachers and people feel there are many different ways to assess a students' learning.  With all of the studies that are around about how to assess and evaluate a students' learning, not everyone is using those methods in their classrooms.

What I liked about this article is it mentions that as teachers, we have the ability to chose what we emphasize as important.  We will then create our lessons with that in mind.  Our students then need to know what we are putting importance on for them to learn.  Therefore, we need to be aware of our choices in the classroom and how we will be evaluating and assessing our students. 

My eyes were opened to the idea that some assessments are actually "correct answer" assessments (225).  While we start assessing our students, we need to be aware of how our assessments are affecting our students in their educational confidence.

Common Core State Standards for ELA Instruction

When you hear “Common Core State Standards (CCSS),” what goes through your mind?  I have heard mixed thoughts about CCSS from teachers, students, family and community members.  Some love the idea of CCSS, others very much dislike the idea, and a few are confused as to what they even are. Even up until now, reading this article, I could hear the multitude of opinions I have been given in my head.

Now let’s take a minute to think about the idea in which CCSS is formed around, help students be better prepared for college and everyday life outside of high school no matter where they are in the United States.  Before reading this article, I never thought about the fact that the federal government didn’t create the idea first, but the individual states had.  The federal government just decided there should be some “main guidelines” for all public schools to follow.  Among many states and educators, there was a bit of an uproar with this when President Bush created “No Child Left Behind.”

As a future educator, I do appreciate the article bringing up the fact that many teachers are upset about using CCSS in their classrooms.  I know many other educators that view CCSS as a giant joke and just a way to make them do more work than necessary or they feel it doesn’t really help prepare the students for what “they feel the students should be learning.”  While it is more work on our part as educators to make sure our students are succeeding in their education, we should be happy knowing that more students are going and graduating from colleges every year.  Some parents are finding their “trust” of public education to prepare their children for the future.

I, however, do agree that in the framework of CCSS we are slowly losing sight of some important content we should be teaching throughout the different courses just so we have our students “meet the standards.”  As we all work to reshape and mold the CCSS throughout the upcoming years, we will hopefully find that balance we seek of meeting standards and teaching key material for multiple areas of life/subjects.

Discussions for success

In Discussion as a Way of Teaching by Stephen Brookfield, I was thrilled to see someone had written on the topic of discussions and the reasons they succeed or fail.  As a student, I have always listened to my teachers mention we needed to come to class prepared; which meant we needed to do the reading for class.  The next day, we would be sitting in a circle for discussion and only 5 or 6 people out of the 25 would actively participate.  However, if we were asked to journal about what we read, almost everyone would have around a page filled with thoughts of the reading.  This article has helped me, as a future teacher see some of the reasons why those discussions failed and how to help students have successful discussions.

One thing I don’t remember most of my teachers in high school doing until I got to college was “setting ground rules” for the class discussions.  They always said we were to actively listen and be respectful to one another, but to us, it was just the “normal” discussion.  Not once did we get to choose how our discussions were going to go or how we wanted everyone to participate and act during the discussions.  I would have been more engaged as a high school student if I felt I had a say in shaping how the discussions would go.  The examples shown on how to set discussion ground rules are very helpful.  While I am currently working with 6^th graders, I feel these will be good to use in all classrooms for Secondary Education.  I plan to implement my own version of these tips in my classrooms.  My students will have the opportunities to reflection on previous class discussions or videos that show “good” and “bad” discussions to see what they would like to have in a class discussion and what they would like to avoid in a class discussion.  This will give them a chance to have a voice in the classroom as well.